Michael Sharpe skewered by @JohntheJack on Twitter

I don't think that is a worry. If it is accepted that PACE was done badly then it will be accepted that any attempt to repeat it will have the same problems. Unless of course some very clever trial design is thought up. But the people who might want to do trials like this are not intelligent enough to know how to do that.

 

I discussed the PACE trial with a friend of mine, a retired professor of neurology, and sent him some links. The next time I met him (for wine, with dinner, but more for the wine, we each paid for our own, an analysis of which will feature in my forthcoming paper as a footnote) his comment was "well, the only thing they can do is run it again". I was crestfallen. Mind you, that was before PACE had been so comprehensively destroyed. Hopefully it has reached the point now where no reasonably intelligent outsider could assume that it just needs running again.

 

You don't. You so don't. You really haven't got the hang of this psychosocial research stuff at all.

Just caught up on this thread and can't stop laughing, for so many reasons. Thanks for the amusement @Barry, @TiredSam and all

 

The term explanatory was used to describe trials that aim to evaluate the efficacy of an intervention in a well-defined and controlled setting, whereas the term pragmaticwas used for trials designed to test the effectiveness of the intervention in a broad routine clinical practice.
A pragmatic view on pragmatic trials - NCBI - NIH
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181997/

PACE evaluated the efficacy of an intervention in a well-defined and controlled setting (even if not adequately controlled). It was certainly not conducted in broad routine practice.

 

Right, and don't forget that the Vice Chancellor of Bristol University has also complained directly to the Chancellor at UC Berkeley in order to stop my work exposing Professor Crawley. More than once.

 

Well if you have had thirty years and taken all the funding and still cant prove your treatments work surely no one could think running another trial would be the solution.

I'm not going to out it past some people to suggest it though.

 

I'm simplifying because I'm exhausted at the moment and can't properly think things through. There must be some consequences. That's the basic thought.

 

My impression is that the pain at QMUL has been significant and the lesson learned. But then White has retired so QMUL is out of the picture maybe. Bristol is more concerning

 

True.

 

Yup. At some point I hope this will all come back to bite those who have abetted this crap. I'm lucky that Berkeley has shown that it actually does try to maintain some standards when it comes to academic freedom, even for non-tenured academic personnel like me. Perhaps that allegiance to standards is surprising to people at Bristol University and others who rely on collegial relationships to promote garbage as legitimate research.

 

I'm sorry but I don't think it is enough for the lessons to be learnt in private, that smacks of a typical establishment cover up, totally looking after themselves. There needs to be a complete public disclosure and apology for what's gone on.

It's not a question of revenge at all, it's justice, accountability and making sure this doesn't happen again.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1007680002391830529

Sharpe retweeted this. Presumably he didn't actually read the quote from the forum, since it doesn't say what cfsresearch claims. In fact, bit of an own goal.

 

Quite. All the data you need can be obtained by flipping a coin a thousand times. Or better yet, multiple coins a hundred each. You then claim anything you want. In this area of medicine the conclusion does not have to follow the data. If you do not get great results then run a subgroup analysis. You could in this way prove that yak fat cures cancer, or raises the dead. What has science got to do with it?
[Satire]

 

I think we can run PACe and GET with the 2 day cpet as a primary outcome measure, it will debunk PACE and give us great data to understand PEM.

 

If you re-ran PACE with 2-day CPET as the baseline measure, you would quickly realise that most of the eligible patients shouldn't be subjected to any further exercise.